ANNIS uses Maven3 as build tool. Maven itself is based on Java and should run on every major operating system. You have to download and install the appropriate version for your operating system from http://maven.apache.org/download.html before you can build ANNIS. Maven will download all needed dependencies from central servers on the first build so you will need to have a working internet connection. The dependencies are cached locally once their are downloaded.

When you have downloaded or checked out the source of ANNIS the top-level directory of the source code is the parent project for all ANNIS sub-projects. If you want to build every project that is part of ANNIS just execute

cd <annis-sources>/
mvn install

This might take a while on the first execution. mvn clean will remove all compiled code if necessary.

If you only want to compile a sub-project execute mvn install in the corresponding sub-directory. Every folder with a sub-project will have a pom.xml file. These files configure the whole build process. The Maven documenation contains detailed explanations of the structure and possible content of the configuration files.

Some sub-projects don't provide a library but will produce a zip or tar/gz- file when they are compiled. These assembly steps (see Maven Assembly documentation) are automatically invoked on mvn install.

While you can use any text editor of your choice to change ANNIS and compile it completely on the command line using Maven, a proper IDE will be a huge help for you. You can use any IDE which has a good support for Maven. The ANNIS main developers currently recommend Eclipse Proton or the Netbeans 9 IDE for development.

This way of running the front-end is very useful, if you want to access Annis on you local machine as a single user.

You don't need to install Jetty or Tomcat by yourself using this method.

cd <unzipped source>/annis-gui/
mvn jetty:run

Now you can access the site under http://localhost:8080/annis-gui/. The Jetty server might be stopped by pressing "CTRL-C".